Monday, February 16, 2009

The AI debate and 20th century philosophy

Philosophy is one of the most important sources for getting alternative perspectives on aproblem. In their critique of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) tradition, Winograd and Floreswere inspired by the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Winograd & Floresfound Heidegger particularly interesting in that they found his ideas to be in direct oppositionto most of the implicit assumptions of the AI field at that time.

Winograd and Flores argued that Heidegger´s understanding of the human condition is abetter foundation for understanding and designing computer technology than the rulingparadigm in AI at that time. As they saw it, the cognitivist approach to understandingcomputers in use must be rejected if we take Heidegger seriously. In this critique theyfollowed up the early work of Dreyfus (“What computers can’t do”, 1972).

The AI debate as such has limited relevance for a study of interactivity. The reason is thatits research question is totally different. The AI debate has centered around the question “Canwe build intelligent computers?”. This was a reaction to early AI research that mainly askedthe question “How do we build intelligent computers?”. The debate led to the question “Whatis intelligence?”, which again led to the question “In what ways are computers different frompeople?”. The latter is the question Dreyfus discussed in (1986) with reference to philosophy.We are then very close to the philosophical question “What does it mean to be human?”.

Dreyfus entered the AI debate from philosophy. He soon realized that the early AIresearchers were in many respects doing philosophy of mind, but with little or no knowledgeor reference to two and a half thousand years of philosophical research on the subject. Themain differences between the AI researchers and the philosophers were their choice ofmedium and their choice of research methodology. For the philosophers, the medium hasalways been language, and the methodology has always been the philosophical discourse. Forthe early AI researchers, the medium was the computer, and the research methodology wassystems construction. Dreyfus showed how the AI research, despite these differences,repeated ancient discussions in the philosophy of mind. The strength of Dreyfus’ analogy isthat it enabled him to make predictions about the results of these “discourses” based on hisknowledge of the similar philosophical discourses. His predictions have so far to a largedegree been correct. I find this to give a strong credibility to his argument.

The strongest relevance of the AI-debate for the current study of interactivity is in its useof philosophy. It showed to many in the computer-science community that philosophy can beused as a resource and inspiration without having to become a philosopher, much in the sameway as researchers in computer science have always used mathematics without becomingmathematicians. Dreyfus (1972) draws mainly on three philosophers: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein. As the work of these philosophers have relevance for the currentwork, a short introduction is appropriate.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) belongs to the phenomenological tradition in Continentalphilosophy. One of its most influential proponents was his teacher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). For Heidegger it was important to move philosophy back from the realm of the spheresto the reality of everyday human life. This meant, as he saw it, a definite break with 2000years of philosophical tradition. In his "Being and Time" from 1927 (Heidegger, 1997), hebreaks with the tradition of exploring ideas without reference to our factual existence ashuman beings. He departed from his teacher concerning the possibility of making explicit this“background” of everyday practices that gives meaning to the world. In trying to develop aphilosophy starting out with our factual human existence, he found himself trapped in the webof meaning produced by the basic assumptions of Western civilization. He found it necessaryto develop a set of new concepts better suited for the task. Reading Heidegger consequentlybecomes a difficult task, as one first has to acquire his new "language". The problem is thatthis language can not be fully understood purely through definitions referring back to our"ordinary" language. The meaning of his concepts slowly emerge through the reading of thework. The reading of Heidegger thus becomes an iterative process, or what in philosophy iscalled a hermeneutic circle.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) was heavily influenced byboth Husserl and Heidegger. Put simply, Heidegger brought philosophy back to everydayhuman life, while Merleau-Ponty took it all the way back to the human body. In Merleau-Ponty´s most important work The Phenomenology of Perception from 1945 (Merleau-Ponty,1962) he explored the implicit assumptions about perception at that time. He ended up with anunderstanding of perception that is totally different from the naive idea of perception asstimuli reception. The latter view can still be found in part of the current literature on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). To Merleau-Ponty, perception is a process where an active bodyenters into a "communion" with its surroundings. Perception is a continuos interactioninvolving the subject's intentions, expectations, and physical actions. From this perspective,every attempt at applying some variation of Shannon and Wiever's information theory (seeReddy, 1993) to Human-Computer Interaction becomes an absurdity. There is clearly no purelyactive "sender" or purely passive "receiver", nor any well-defined "information" or "point intime". The fact that his understanding is in direct opposition to some of the most influentialtheoretical foundations of the HCI field, makes a study of Merleau-Ponty an interestingstarting point for an exploration of human-computer interaction.Since Merleau-Ponty published Phenomenology of Perception in 1945, phenomenologyas a philosophical discipline has developed further. The most complete attempt to date atbuilding a complete analysis of human existence based on the phenomenological insights isdone by Schutz and Luckman in their The structure of the life-world (1973). Luckman usesthis framework as a foundation for his current empirical study of everyday social interaction.As a sociologist, he makes use of light-weight video equipment and films long sequences ofeveryday interaction between people in their natural surroundings. He then analyzes thesesequences in search of levels of meaning.

In British philosophy we find a similar questioning of the limits of analytical approachesin the late work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Wittgenstein started out with a pureanalytical approach to philosophy. His main interest was the philosophy of language. In hismost important early work “Tractatus” (Wittgenstein, 1923), he argued for the logical natureof language and worked out a complete system for determining the “truth value” of sentences.Referring to the AI debate, his early position would have placed him among the firstgeneration of AI researchers with their trust in an analytical, symbolic, and de-contextualizedapproach.

After publishing “Tractatus”, Wittgenstein found no interest in philosophy, as he thoughits problems to be “solved”. After some years as a school teacher in Austria, he startedquestioning the foundations of his early work, and returned to Oxford. He struggled until hisdeath with all the paradoxes he found in his early approach. He never developed hisideas into a coherent philosophy, but published his thoughts on the subject in“Philosophical Investigations” (post-hume, 1953). He found one of the most importantproblems of the analytical approach to an understanding of language to be its lack of attentionto context. This led him to develop the concepts language game and life form. To the lateWittgenstein, the meaning of a sentence is given by its use. Language is primarily a means ofcommunication. In a certain use situation, there is a context of language users, physicalobjects, and practices that give meaning to the words. He described these local uses oflanguage as language games. He further argues that all use of language is done within acertain language game, whether it is involving only two people coordinating a specializedtask, or a discourse about the language of philosophy itself. For language users to be ableto comprehend the words of another language user, they need a shared background ofexperience. This includes culture, corporeality, sensory system, social life etc. Wittgensteinuses the term life form for this. To him, language users of different life forms can never trulycommunicate.We see strong similarities between Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein in theircritique of a purely analytical approach to philosophy. They all ended up with a focus oneveryday life, and on our factual existence as human beings. This is why Dreyfus found themrelevant for the AI debate, and this is why they are relevant for a discussion of interactivity.